Stray Kite Studios is gearing up to launch Wartorn into Early Access, bringing players a unique blend of squad-based strategy and roguelite mechanics. Set in the Isles of Talaur, the game follows sisters Yara and Elani as they fight to survive and rebuild their lost home. With an elemental combat system that encourages creative, emergent strategies and a dynamic narrative that evolves with each run, Wartorn promises a fresh take on the genre. In this interview, Paul Hellquist, Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder of Stray Kite Studios, shares insights on the studio’s approach to game design, the challenges of integrating storytelling into a roguelite, and how player feedback will shape Wartorn during Early Access.
How has your team’s experience with large-scale, big-budget titles influenced the design of Wartorn?
To some degree I would say that our big-budget backgrounds have encouraged us to do things that we would not be able to do on those big-budget projects. For example, we can make design decisions that can be embraced by a passionate genre audience but doesn’t need to appeal to every single gamer on the planet. Our biggest shift in mindset is remembering that we don’t have the team size or the budget of those previous teams. This reality has forced us to pick our battles and find more ways to provide high quality through clever solutions and the efficiencies a small team can create.
Stray Kite Studios is self-publishing Wartorn. How has that independence influenced your creative decisions compared to working under a major publisher?
First off, we don’t have to worry about convincing anyone about what should be in the game, what is most important to the game, or to try and support the agendas of a publisher’s high level strategic goals or stockholders. The independence has allowed us to follow our guts and our developer intuition, which in our experience has always led to the best outcomes in the games we’ve worked on in the past. We can also get a little more edgy and explore some topics and concepts that are often hard to get a publisher on board with.
So far all of those things have led to self-publishing being exciting, liberating, and terrifying all at once.
The game’s elemental interactions and destructible environments introduce dynamic, physics-based tactics. Can you share an example of how these mechanics can lead to unexpected or emergent gameplay moments?
Our elemental system is based on simple rules for how the elements interact with each other. This leads to interesting knock-on effects that you often can’t really plan for. The best example that we discovered fairly early on was how our arrows, which are made of the “plant” element, would automatically catch on fire when they flew through a summoned area of fire. They would keep flying and then hit their target, lighting them on fire, then that target lights something else on fire. Then you start trying to take advantage of these things to gain access to elements you might not have in your current squads. Adding physics to all of this creates even more unexpected outcomes as a grenade bounces off a tree you didn’t expect and suddenly creates a problem while also lighting the forest on fire. As development has continued we have been adding more and more of these rules based interactions which can create some very cool and unexpected, yet predictable, moments.
Roguelites often focus on procedural challenges rather than fixed story beats. What challenges did you face while integrating a strong narrative into Wartorn?
Adding a strong narrative to a rogue-lite is definitely tricky, thankfully there are some great examples of how to do it well. Hades, in particular, really opened our eyes to how narrative can be an additional driving force while playing a rogue-lite. We have been inspired by some of the things they did when crafting the narrative. One of the biggest challenges is keeping things fresh when you start new runs of the game. We have really enjoyed working through those challenges and finding interesting ways to present narrative to the players to keep the story growing along with the mechanics.
The game presents tough moral choices – how deeply do these impact the world and characters? Will there be multiple endings or diverging story paths?
The choices in our game aren’t really about moral choices. We are not trying to judge you or reward you for doing what is considered morally right. We want to present players with situations that may emotionally affect them and then present them with decisions where the gameplay/mechanical needs of their caravan may be at odds with what the player feels is “right” from a narrative and roleplaying standpoint. In this way we want to confront players to think about the situations from not only their personal perspective, but also the perspective of our heroes, Yara and Elani, who are responsible for the lives of everyone in the caravan. Sometimes what is “right” is not always that obvious and surviving in a warzone can lead you to places you may have thought you never would go.
As far as multiple endings? It is a rogue-lite. How the story ends will be different every time you fail. 🙂 From the highest level, there is only one ending to the plot but getting there is going to be quite a journey.
What are your goals for the Early Access phase? Are there specific aspects of gameplay or balance you’re hoping to refine with community feedback?
Early Access presents a unique opportunity to adjust things on the fly while taking community feedback into consideration at an earlier stage than normal. The beauty of this is, we do not have to solely focus on one specific aspect of the gameplay or balance. We may think there is an aspect of gameplay that we are unsure about with another we are quite confident in, but until we let the community dive in, we may actually be completely wrong and can then steer things in those directions as they come. Having our demo in the hands of players during Steam NextFest has been scary yet gratifying! Seeing streamers play the game live and their reactions to different things is powerful, but the feedback and telemetry has helped us more already than we likely thought and gives us confidence in how we digest feedback with Early Access as we move toward 1.0.
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